Today is Transgender Day of Visibility

[Terabith]

I'm going to share the posts of my good friend and former roommate that he made public.  

I guess today is national transgender day of visibility. For years I have resisted marking this occasion with my own story because I am fiercely protective of my privacy, especially on this most private topic.

 

My medical transition started more than twelve years ago, but in truth my transition from female to male began years earlier in the college computer lab in the middle of the night when I sat, eyes burning at 2am, scouring the young internet for stories that hit me in the gut with an intensity I did not understand.

 

It's too hard to talk about what that time was like for me, and painful to recall the ensuing years, which I spent desperately trying to be anything but a transgender person.  I can tell you about the contempt I saw in people's faces, the anger I heard in their voices when they called me "it," the glares I encountered anytime I was in public. I can tell you what it was like not to use a public bathroom for years.  I's harder for me to explain what my internal experience was like: the dawning realization that i literally could not imagine a future in which I existed; the feeling that my body was a weight I carried around; the sensation, all the time, that I was trapped in a room filling with water.

 

Beginning medical transition was an act of absolute desperation for me and came at a time when I knew with total certainty that I couldn't live any longer if nothing changed. Transition brought its own complications: navigating the hostility of the health care system, the legal system, and the social structures invested in how my sex was documented. I don't even know how to chronicle all these experiences: the doctors who refused to treat me; the office staff who laughed at me and hung up on me; the employers who refused me accurate documentation; the job I had to leave because I was afraid I would be killed.

 

This says nothing of the losses i anticipated and whose possibility I had to accept in order to transition: that I would lose everything, and everyone, in my life. That I would never be able to see myself in the faces of my children; that, perhaps, I would never be able or allowed to be a parent at all. These staggering losses paled only when paired with the alternative: a future I could not survive.

 

And so I persisted, and gradually things became easier or, at least, different. I felt, finally, able to breathe again as I found myself able to move through the world as a man. For awhile I was disoriented by people's kindness-- who were these people talking to? And then I would remember that, finally, the world saw only my manhood and not the story that lay beneath it. In the absence of context, they treated me with respect I had never encountered in my adult life. And this is its own complicated experience-- knowing that only the invisibility of your most courageous act allows people to see your humanity. And even the protection of this invisibility cloak is incomplete; it leaves you exposed to the things people say when they think a trans person is not in the room, and there you are, trying to decide whether to rip off the cloak and defend yourself or stay invisible, complicit, and silent.

For years I have chosen silence because it offered me a kind of protection: from this most painful part of my life being a topic of gossip and jokes; from others' inability to understand my life now in the light of my past life; from the threats and fears I felt when people's eyes landed on me and their attention turned to my life. For years I hoped and believed that I could simply outlive my old life and replace it with the solid present and future I had beaten into existence out of sheer will.

 

And yet, here we are at the "transgender tipping point," all these years later. And we are all as afraid as ever-- maybe more. The public's focus, which so many of us had learned to deftly avoid, is inescapable, and with it comes an onslaught of vitriol. For weeks i've woken from dreams of those old days when fear and exhaustion tailed me everywhere that I went; in one dream three men show up at my door to punish me for using the men's room.

I feel, in part, like I have been caught by the current and dragged back into a riptide I barely escaped. For me, this is exhausting, heartbreaking, maddening. I believe I will survive it again but I know what it will cost me.

 

But what of all those who have come up behind me in the time passed, still children, still grasping toward the buoyancy of a life that they can recognize or imagine themselves living? Haunted as I am by dark, threatening dreams and the diffuse disgust of the politicians, neighbors, and talking heads, I cling at least to the knowledge that I have built this life for myself, which seemed so impossible and unreachable all those years ago. When I startle awake from the pursuit of harm, I wake at least in this body, able to believe I will continue to exist.

 

My heart is shattered by the grief, fear, and despair of so many young people who I love both directly and indirectly. They will not all live to see adulthood. They will not all live to see tomorrow. Some will be killed in the streets. Some will be killed by those who are supposed to love them. Some will be killed by the void of an unimaginable future. Some will step in front of trucks or trains, making manifest the obliteration the world has offered them. All of them, all of us, will lose parts of our lives to the work of carrying on each day in the face of hostility and misunderstanding and isolation and bigotry.

 

This is why I've started talking about my trans experience. The cost of my privacy no longer seems too much to pay for the possibility of changing even one heart in a world afire with hatred.

 

We need your help, too. We need you to confront what's said about us, what's done to us, what erases us. we need you to become visible, too.”

[Terabith]

And another post, from a few years prior:  

Y'all may know that Sunday is trans day of visibility, but since it's Friday and we're all here now, i have some things to say.

 

The first, as always, is that what I want is a world where trans people do not have to trade our privacy for our dignity, where we no longer have to perform the trauma show to win the hearts and minds of people who exist comfortably in a system that oppresses and marginalizes us. Not every trans person wants to be visible, and every trans person who chooses visibility also chooses the vulnerability that comes with being an openly trans person in a world that wishes trans people did not exist. Even those who can't or don't choose visibility can't escape the onslaught of vitriol directed at trans people, and those who choose or have sometimes chosen to allow themselves to be visible open themselves to direct personal attacks of all kinds. being a visible trans person is hard and costly and sometimes requires folks to display their most private and intimate experiences to an audience of people that has proven unsafe and untrustworthy. Some trans people transition with the intention of never again acknowledging their history, and for them visibility has an extra price.

 

What I want from trans day of visibility in not just-- and, in fact, not really-- for more trans people to publicly acknowledge our trans status and experiences. Sure, there's a lot of value for young/new/struggling trans folks in seeing other trans people in society, and some evidence that hearing from trans people can help facilitate change, but the visibility I really wish for on this day is not from trans people; it's from the cis people who want to be our allies.

 

I want cis allies to stand up today and do the work of confronting and addressing misconceptions, prejudices, and marginalization of trans people. I want cis allies to deeply examine their beliefs about "biological sex." I want cis allies to learn all the ways legal, social, health care, and other systems are failing and burdening trans people. I want cis allies to talk about these ideas ALL THE TIME. I want cis allies to normalize singular they. I want cis allies to go to their HR departments and find out if their benefits cover transgender health services and then keep demanding that coverage until it happens. I want cis allies to stop making and start confronting jokes about small dicks, tiny hands, and deep-voiced women. I want cis allies to SHOW UP and make themselves as vulnerable as I am when my trans status is known.

It's great if you want to lift up feel good stories about trans people right now, but you need to also-- probably more importantly-- lift up your own voices so the trans people you know can stop for one hot second the constant worthiness hustle wherein we work desperately to show/prove our humanity so we might be treated as human. Make yourself visible for trans people. Show up. Speak up. Pick up the slack.

 

Edited to add: allies, also check yourselves on how much unpaid labor you are accepting from trans people. If I had received compensation for the countless hours of education I’ve done for cis people, I’d be able to afford the healthcare I need right now. One way to be sure trans people are being compensated for the work you consume is to buy books written by trans people. There are some great options right now like Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Trans, by Brynn Tannehill; Sissy by Jacob Tobia; Whipping Girl by Julia Serano, and Tomorrow Will Be Different by Sarah McBride.

#tdov #transdayofvisibility

[dirty ethel rackham]

💜  Thank you for sharing this.  As the parents of an adult trans child, we have witnessed tremendous struggle and gone through our own struggles as well.  Choosing to accept and love our child have cost us close family relationships, most of our friendships, and our church family.  But none of that compares to what my child goes through. 

We found out in the context of suicidal ideation and practice attempts, so we learned real quick that choosing love and acceptance is a matter of life and death.  The battle for her to find reasons to stay alive is continuous. 

[Terabith]

We joked that there must have been something in the water at my college.  In the late 90's, well before the societal rise in rates of transgender folks, a pretty large number of friends and acquaintances transitioned.  I was very close to two of them:  my roommate, who wrote these posts, and another friend, who is my oldest's godmother.  I witnessed remotely the struggles that these friends went through and also how much more comfortable they were in their skin after their transition, and I am so grateful that I had that experience of people I loved transitioning before my own child came out as non binary.  

And it was still a huge grief, and things that I would not have expected to be hard have been so very hard, but I am grateful for the courage of these members of my generation and their openness on this Transgender Day of Visibility.  

 

[MEmama]

Thank you @Terabith and to your friend for sharing this story.

May it help open eyes and hearts. ❤️

[Faith-manor]

Thank you so much for sharing!